The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [88]
‘ATTILA is over,’ she said. ‘Crane will be moved from Winchester. Peter is going to lose his job. You won’t see either of them ever again.’
They were crawling around the M25, boxed in by lorries and bored men in vans. Gaddis thought of Peter pulling him around the Hampshire countryside with a Sean Connery satnav for company and felt a sting of guilt that he would now be out of a job. ‘What if Crane tries to contact me?’ he asked. He hadn’t thought through the question; he had merely wanted to provoke a reaction in Tanya. But the thought gave him a glimpse of an idea. Had MI6 seen the hushmails? Might he still be able to communicate with Crane via an encrypted message?
‘Crane won’t try to contact you,’ Tanya replied, but there was no conviction in her voice.
‘How can you be sure?’ Gaddis was beginning to believe that he could save the book. It was extraordinary to him, but in spite of everything that had happened, he was determined to finish what he had started. ‘You think a man like that isn’t capable of deceiving MI6?’
‘I think Edward Crane is capable of anything.’
‘Precisely.’ He looked out of the window. He needed to give the impression that his interest in ATTILA was over, to lie with the same finesse that Tanya had shown in deceiving him. ‘Anyway, you have nothing to worry about. I understand my situation. If he calls, I’ll ignore him. I’d rather wash my hands of the whole thing.’
‘You would?’
‘Sure. What am I going to do, run the risk of getting shot by the FSB?’ Tanya acknowledged the inevitability of Russian involvement with a brisk nod. ‘I understand the terms of our deal.’
He looked at her face, tiredness beginning to colour her eyes. It was strange, but it felt wrong to be deceiving her. The events in Berlin had forged a strange kind of bond between them.
‘I’ll go back to UCL,’ he said. ‘The book won’t get written. With any luck this will be the last time we ever see one another.’
Chapter 31
They dropped him at his house in Shepherd’s Bush and Gaddis found it just as he had left it a little more than a day earlier.
But, of course, it was no longer the same house. It was now a house with tapped phones, a house with bugged rooms, a house with a computer that spoke to faceless geeks at Vauxhall Cross and GCHQ. He opened the curtains in the sitting room and looked out at the cars parked on the street. There was a van directly opposite his front door, a van with blacked-out windows.
This is my future, he thought. This is the price of consorting with Edward Crane.
In an act of petty defiance, he walked outside, banged on the panelling of the van, said: ‘Make mine with two sugars,’ then went down to Uxbridge Road, entered a phone box and dialled Peter’s number. The connection was dead. No message or sound. Just a void at the other end of the line. Hungry and strung out, he took a Tube to UCL, dealt with his post and emails, then bought a new jacket at a store on Great Marlborough Street from a teenage shop assistant who popped bubbles of gum as she ran his credit card through the till.
He needed cash. He needed a new mobile phone. He needed to find a way of living his life which would restore some degree of privacy to his punctured existence. Nowadays everything left a trail: there would be number plate recognition on his car; alerts on his Oyster card; triggers every time he used a bank account. Gaddis would have to assume, at least in the first few weeks of his arrangement with Tanya, that MI6 would continue to watch him, to ensure that he did not break his word. His calls, his emails, his movements around London would all be monitored by an army of watchers whom he would never sense, never identify, never see.
He took out £900 from an ATM on Shaftesbury Avenue, the daily limit on his three accounts now that Nat West had wired him the proceeds of yet another £20,000 personal loan. He bought a monthly Travelcard. He paid cash in a shop on Tottenham Court Road for a Nokia mobile, registering a new SIM with the address of a flat in Kensal